A Comparison of Charles Taylor and Talal Asad on the Issue of Secularity (original) (raw)
Related papers
Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age
Journal of Contemporary Religion, 2012
Debates about secularism refuse to go away just because some have declared that we live in a post-secular world. Indeed, it is only now when a high-decibel monologue about the importance of saving secularism has quietened down that certain conversations about secularism are possible. Efforts to come to a more fine-grained understanding of the different facets of secularism are underway in academia and this book is a valuable addition to that project. The original impetus for this collection was Charles Taylor's A Secular Age. This poses the challenge of placing the collection: is it to be read with and/or after Taylor's book or separately from it, as a book in its own right? In their introduction to this collection, the editors provide a helpful overview of Taylor's book and place it within his larger body of work. It would, of course, be helpful to have read the 896 pages of A Secular Age to engage fully with the ideas which the contributors to this collection present, but, equally, the collection can serve as a guide to reading Taylor's work with a more critical eye. To my mind, however, the collection can stand alone-largely because of the strength of some of the chapters which make a wider contribution to debates about secularism. At the very least, the collection of responses to Taylor's work moves beyond his arguments, with most authors bringing their distinctive disciplinary and critical perspectives into the discussion. Jon Butler's contribution, for instance, is a much-needed corrective to the lack of historical specificity, not just in Taylor's book but in most theory-driven investigations of secularism and secularisation. (Another recent contribution in this regard is the volume edited by Ira Katznelson and Gareth Stedman Jones on Religion and the Political Imagination.) Butler rightly points out that there is significant historical material which goes against the assumption that belief was axiomatic prior to the Reformation. Acknowledging the presence of indifference if not outright lack of belief in the pre-Reformation period dislodges the singularity of contemporary developments and ''secularization theory's impulse towards inevitability'' (211). Butler contends that Taylor ignores this literature not for lack of learning but due to epistemological bias. Jonathan Sheehan's contribution may initially seem to be orthogonal to Butler's when he asks if questions of historical specificity, including those raised by Butler, ''irritate or otherwise deflect the 'secular age' concept in any way'' (224) and answers in the negative. Yet, Sheehan, too, suggests a fundamental alternative to Taylor's reading of history by arguing for a deeper exploration of the non-religious outside the concept of 'secular'. Similarly, Wendy Brown's contribution is an excellent example of an interlocutor who engages generously but critically with Taylor's arguments and in the process opens doors for thinking about secularism more deeply. Brown tackles Taylor's dismissal of historical materialism and attempts to show why and how a nuanced historical materialism may yield results in furthering our understanding of secularism within a neo-liberal context. In a Book Reviews 147
Talal Asad and Charles Taylor have been thinking and writing about secularism for at least one decade. Their works are widely read, discussed, and admired. They, by and large, constitute the contemporary framework of discussion for those interested in issues revolving around secularization, secularism, and the secular, which although are terms that refer to distinctive phenomena, are often misused as if they are either the same or simply aspects of the same process. However, these two scholars still hold significantly different, if not mutually contradictory, ideas about secularism. The aim of this article is not to provide a summary of their thoughts on secularism, but rather, to compare and contrast their critically different approaches to the issue of secular-ism. In this regard, this article argues that an unbridgeable gap exists between Asad's and Taylor's approaches to and engagements with the secular.
Between Secularity and Post-Secularity: Critical Appraisal of Charles Taylor's Account
Bogoslovni vestnik
The article deals with Charles Taylor's account of the secular age. In the first part, the main constituents of Taylor's narrative account are presented: the central concepts, distinctions, definition of the subject, the aims etc. The author pays special attention to the notions of secularity, secular age, religion, and transcendence. In the second part, Taylor's genealogy of the secular age is outlined and comparatively placed in the context of other main relative forms of genealogical account. Because our age is an age of authenticity, a special section is devoted to it. The final section presents some reproaches to Taylor and evaluates their strength and the value of Taylor's contribution. Besides, some speculative »forecasts« about secularity and post-secularity in Europe, the USA, and at the global scale are presented (by reference to Taylor's account). The author concludes that despite some (serious and cogent) reproaches and second thoughts about Taylor...
Can Secularism be Other-wise? (A Critique of Charles Taylor's A Secular Age)
Given the extensive commentary and discussion that has followed the publication of A Secular Age, any further re flection on this work seems to risk repetition and redundancy. To avoid this, I will focus for the most part on three issues that I think have received little attention so far. These are: (1) the normative thrust of Taylor's account of secularism in Euro-Atlantic Christian so ci e ties; (2) the relationship of this largely subjectivist account to political secularism; and (3) the place accorded to religious difference in Taylor's vision for reshaping contemporary Christianity in Western liberal so ci e ties.
SECULARISM: ITS CONTENT AND CONTEXT
This paper addresses two sets of questions. First, questions about the meaning of secularism and second questions about its justification and implementation. It is argued that Charles Taylor's recent efforts to redefine secularism for a time when we have gone ‗beyond toleration' to multiculturalism in liberal politics, are based on plausible (and laudable) political considerations that affect the question of justification and implementation, but leave unaffected the question of the meaning and content of secularism. An alternative conceptualization of secularism is offered, from the one he proposes, while also addressing his deep and understandable concerns about the politics of secularism for our time. In the characterization of secularism offered, it turns out that secularism has its point and meaning, not in some decontextualized philosophical argument, but only in contexts that owe to specific historical trajectories, with specific political goals to be met.
Conclusion: A New Approach to Secularization
Springer eBooks, 2022
In the first chapter of this book, I picked up two ideas from Charles Taylor's A Secular Age and ran with them. The first idea was that analyses of secularization should be pitched on the level of unarticulated assumptions underpinning collective practices and technologies. This, I suggested, untethers the process of secularization from the question of people's conscious beliefs, articulated experiences, or preferred identity markers. The second idea was that secularity denotes a specific kind of time mediated on this level; in other words, that secularity is one kind of time that makes certain technological collective practices make sense. This untethers secularity from the concept of 'religion'. Contemporary historiographies of the secular are more or less stuck in a conceptual blind alley debating identity markers and religion's 'others'. In this book, I have tried to show that these two elements of Taylor's thesis, when pragmatically developed and combined with recent theoretical and historiographical turns, offer a possible way out. Of course, many historians are interested in the development of 'religion', or concerned with affirming certain groups' self-identification as 'secular' in the 'nonreligious' sense. I expect some of them might find the idea of removing these questions entirely from histories of secularization a little controversial. Of course, the ways that people articulate their experience of having 'beliefs' and 'non-beliefs' or being 'religious' or 'nonreligious' are important simply because so many are socially and politically
ucalgary.ca
My lecture this evening focuses on the latest book by Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor entitled, A Secular Age (2007). 1 The book has been attracting wide attention in the scholarly community and, I think, justly so. He offers valuable insights into the complex factors that have given rise to secularism in the West. Taylor also offers insight into the continuing strength of religious faith in our day and explains why many secularization theorists, who prophesied the demise of religion, have been wrong. It is in a spirit of respect and appreciation that I offer my reading of Taylor's new book.